


the best worst thing.

by lovelyorbent



Series: pretty golden hair [1]
Category: Pacific Rim (2013)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Escorts, Chuck is a Brat, Fake/Pretend Relationship, M/M, Prostitution, Snark, gratuitous pop culture references
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-22
Updated: 2015-04-22
Packaged: 2018-03-25 07:56:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 15,660
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3802678
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lovelyorbent/pseuds/lovelyorbent
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>herc hires escort!yancy and everything just goes downhill from there.</p><p>alternate title: the fake boyfriends fic from hell.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the best worst thing.

**Author's Note:**

  * For [kuro49](https://archiveofourown.org/users/kuro49/gifts).



> (i figure if i gift this it's somehow no longer my fault.)
> 
> disclaimer: this fic is literally trash and also not good at all. if i were asked to think of one redeeming quality for this fic it is that i had to throw out approximately 3k extra of bad jokes when i edited this. unfortunately, one of the scrapped jokes may make an appearance in part two of this, if i ever get off my ass and write the part two. there's no sex, no real resolution, and this was mostly an exercise in nearly 16k of yancy being a Huge Tool. the title was originally pretty golden hair but i decided to switch it to a lyric from american beauty/american psycho because it was my go song for this piece of garbage. i'm really, extraordinarily bad at writing herc from herc's head.
> 
> basically: i'm publishing this because i can no longer bear to look at it, but also cannot bear to throw out 16k of bad jokes.
> 
> have fun. let yancy's stand-up comedy audition begin.

Hercules Hansen can get his own fucking dates, but he doesn't really have time for it, right now.

But the boy's always needling him about not getting any, and so's the press, and there's a function coming up and he really does not have the energy to go out and pick up some bird who thinks he's actually interested and break her heart later, and furthermore, someone who knows the score will play the part much better.

And fuck it, he's an adult fucking man who can pay a date if he wants to.

Maybe he's trying a little too hard to justify this to himself.

Maybe if he were totally shameless like his idiot kid this wouldn't bother him so much, but it does, mostly because he knows exactly how hard Chuck would laugh if he knew about this. Thank god the little fucker's only going to be seeing the photos afterwards, because he's smart enough to tell in a hot second if he were there in person, no matter how good an actor whoever he ends up asking for ends up being.

The benefit of this particular website is that they don't have pictures readily available to the internet that anyone can search this bloke's face back to, but it also means he's going to have to take the heat of having it be a bloke, which is not ideal, but also a great 'fuck you' to the higher ups.

He's thinking too much about it.  It's not like he's paying for sex, even though, yeah, that is typically what an escort service means.

He makes the call and lays down the rules and has some rules laid down for him and hangs up and is tempted to throw the stupid phone at the wall, but waits instead for it to ping with the list of faces.  He copies the first one on the list and sends it back without thinking about it, some lazy-looking blonde kid who's probably— _probably_ —not young enough to be his son.

And if he's going to spitefully make Stacker deal with the fallout of him showing up with a man, he's not going to make it worse by showing up with some jailbait.

He's going to catch hell for this later anyway, but fuck it.

The guy shows up five minutes early, day of, looking lazy and bored, an expression that disappears like smoke off his face in a second flat when Herc opens the door into a generic smile.  "Pizza delivery," he says, which is made twice as ridiculous by the grey suit he's wearing, no tie.

Herc rolls his eyes and reaches forwards to button the top three buttons on the the guy's shirt, then tosses one of Chuck's ties at him, the one he'd decided not to wear. "Put that on."

"Can't have me _looking_ like a whore." His voice is slow and amused, verging on a drawl.  Still, he clearly knows how to tie a tie, even if he doesn't look terribly pleased about it, fingers tucking it easily.

It doesn't quite go with the suit, but Herc could not possibly care less.  "I'm not paying you for that tonight. What do I call you?"

"Sure you aren't. I'm Yancy.  But you feel free to assign me any name you want as long as you tell me first so I can respond to it.  And there's no way on earth you actually go by Hercules, so out with it."

"Herc," Herc tells him, and grabs his hat off the hook by the door.  "And your name's fine—as long as you mock up some last name and can lie your way out of a paper bag, I don't give a shit."

The indolent smile from the picture uncurls, and Yancy leans up to kiss his cheek.  "You bet I can.  Let's get going, baby."

"Don't call me that."

"Sugar? Darling?  Pumpkin, maybe?"

"Can I get a refund if I send you back?"

"Nope," Yancy says, popping the 'p' sound and grinning.  "But I promise to be more biddable arm candy when we actually get there."

It's going to be a long fucking night.

But god damn, the boy has an ass on him.

 

Herc about forgets that Yancy’s there while he’s writing Chuck a note about when he’ll be back, et cetera, what to do about dinner, but as soon as they’re in the car together, it’s difficult to ignore his presence.  Mostly because he won’t fucking shut up.  “So, I did a google search before I came—”

“You did what?”

“My homework, Sergeant,” Yancy answers serenely, and raises an eyebrow, looking so arch it’s easy to forget he’s a kid with one of the world’s shittiest jobs. “You gonna let me finish?”

When Herc doesn’t object, he continues.

“—so I know the basics of who you are and what you do.  But—and I’m assuming here—if you’d rather not look like a total fake, there’s some extra ground to cover.”

Herc sighs. Rubs a hand over his eyes and wonders how he ended up in a car with a high-class hooker on the way to a military function in the first place.  Because the situation is so entirely ridiculous he’s pretty sure it could come right the fuck out of a dime novel.  “Jesus.”

“I know,” Yancy tells him, reaching out a hand to put on his shoulder.  The obvious attempt at soothing is entirely ruined by the grin that sprouts on his face.  “Hiring a whore has gotten really complicated, hasn’t it?”

Glancing out the driver’s side window turns into another examination of whatever the hell he’s gotten himself into, so he looks back again at the kid in the passenger’s seat of his car.  He’s a handsome kid, to be sure, but in the dim light, face lit only by headlights and the occasional neon sign, he looks so much younger than he had in full light that Herc feels—again—a little bad about this.  Maybe it’s the way he’s sitting—the same way Chuck does when Herc insists on being the one in the driver’s seat from time to time, knees parted with one foot on the floor and the other dangling from where his leg is propped up, just a little, against the door—but it feels exploitative all of a sudden, which is fucking ridiculous because he hasn’t so much as touched him.  Probably it’s the way Yancy keeps using that word on himself— _whore_ —even though he’s pretty sure he isn’t doing it on purpose. “D’you _ever_ get repeat clients?” he asks after a moment, drily. “The attitude doesn’t strike me as much of a draw.”

Which is, well, sort of a total fucking lie, but there’s no way a google search and fifteen minutes of face time told Yancy how appealing he sometimes finds a sharp tongue.

“If someone’s pissed,” Yancy tells him easily, “I dial it back.  But you’re not.  And honestly, lots of people don’t even listen to me.  You didn’t hire me to hear me talk.”

“That’s my point.”

“As you wish,” Yancy shrugs, dropping in a terrible English accent, and then falls silent.

It’s uncomfortable for the first few minutes because it’s so obviously manufactured, but Herc’s natural affinity for not talking kicks in pretty quick.

“By the way,” he tells Yancy as he pulls up and throws the car into park.  “This is a military do, so a good half of them are going to fucking hate you.”

“Excellent.”

“And try not to be a stereotype.”

“This is the sort of thing I suggested we discuss earlier,” Yancy points out as he climbs out of the car.  “But _someone_ liked his silence.”

Herc ignores the obvious jab. “What last name’re you going to use?”

“Lapierre.” When Herc stares at him, Yancy straightens his tie and grins, shrugging.

He figures it could be a lot worse.

So they go in, and for a half hour, it’s not that bad.  Yancy turns on some smooth charm he hadn’t been displaying before—if he weren’t basically glued into Herc’s side, he’d swear the boy was flirting with the ancient military blokes’ ancient wives.  And for all he follows Herc’s various instructions and cues to the letter, he never once falls into submissiveness or the sort of femininity people try to pin on gay blokes all the time.  Indeed, he carries himself with enough dignity that it’s near impossible to imagine he might be anything less than what he’s pretending to be.

It’s easy enough, for that half hour, to forget the media circus tomorrow is going to be and his worries about Yancy accidentally letting his job slip and, in fact, the simple fact that he’s paying an escort service exorbitant amounts of money for tonight.

At least until Stacker walks in with his daughter.

Then that pretty smile freezes on Yancy’s face.

Not that Herc notices that for a moment, because he’s too busy assessing the unamused look his commanding officer is giving him.  But he comes to and sees it when Yancy elbows him, and leans up towards his ear to whisper, “She knows me.”

As Stacker and Mako walk towards them, Herc resists the urge to gape at him.  “Are you joking?”

“Hello, Sgt. Hansen. Mr. Becket,” Mako greets him, and obviously, no, Yancy was not joking.

 _Becket_?

He wants to sink into the floor.

It is an unfamiliar feeling, and he doesn’t much like it.

“Hey!” Yancy replies, a smile plastered back over his face.  “Mako.”  And _he_ doesn’t look embarrassed at all, the little fuck.  “It’s Lapierre tonight,” He continues, in the tone of a confession, a private lowering of his voice.  ”We talked about it and I didn’t want the media buzz around Raleigh, if it came down to that.”

And he laughs, a little, gestures between them when he says _we_ like they make decisions like that together, and leans into Herc’s side. Which he’s been avoiding doing all night, careful not to come more into physical contact with him than a hand on his arm or shoulder or back, but _now_ he’s all fucking snuggly, and Herc is perplexed.

“That makes sense,” Mako muses, after a moment of thinking about it, like she’s _assessing their story_ , which she probably is.  “I did not know you two knew each other.”

Yancy laughs again, and Herc is looking everywhere but Stacker’s face.  “I didn’t know _you_ knew Herc.”

Herc is profoundly grateful Chuck is not here, because he would be laughing his stupid little arse off at how much like a bad romcom Yancy sounds.

“Where did you meet?”

To his credit, Yancy hardly even pauses to think.  “Met him while I was running and he was walking the dog.  And, well, I’m cute, so he didn’t say no when I asked if I could buy him coffee.”

It’s stupidly cute, say nothing of the fact that he has no idea how Yancy knew he had a dog. Is that on Google? And Stacker is staring at him with so much irritation in his eyes he can actually feel it burning into the side of his face.  Holding the stoic, upright soldierly expression is becoming very difficult. It is also becoming very difficult not to imagine that gorgeous arse in running shorts, which is not ideal material for helping keep a straight face.

And he can tell his ears are turning pink as he processes that damn cover story.

Which is, of course, when a flashbulb goes off near them.

“Marshal,” he says lightly, trying to play how pissed Stacker is off like it’s nothing. “if I break that camera, how many weeks of paperwork will you give me?”

Predictably, it does nothing to defuse any of the annoyance on the man’s face.  But Yancy laughs, and it’s the most fake thing he’s said or done all night.  The kid is faltering for the first time this evening.

A half hour of whirling through old women and all it takes is a minute with Stacker Pentecost to crack him.

“I understand the importance of authenticity,” Stacker raises his glass to his lips and somehow manages to make the motion look dangerous, like he’s some kind of James Bond villain, “But did you have to be authentic about your sexuality _tonight_ , Hercules?”

If only he knew how entirely inauthentic this really is.

But he doesn’t, and Herc has no desire to explain the fact that he hired the next step down from “call girl” to pretend to be his date tonight, because there is no world in which that situation is not mildly embarrassing to have to explain to your boss, which is the role Stacker is playing this evening.  So he takes his cue from Yancy’s stupidly cute meeting story and puts an arm around his waist.  “I had a plus one and I didn’t think it was fair to Yancy to bring someone else.”

That he manages to deliver that line with a straight face—that Yancy manages to _hear_ him deliver that line with a straight face—is nothing short of a god damned miracle.

But Stacker isn’t giving him the _none of your fucking bullshit now Hercules_ look, he’s giving him the _we’re talking about this later and I will be reaming your ass so hard your pretty little boyfriend gets jealous_ look.

Which isn’t _better_ , but it has a chance of not ending in the _brought a gay hooker to a military function_ talk.

So sort of a miracle in and of itself.

“Jesus,” Yancy says quietly, brow furrowed, when Stacker and Mako move on. “I’ve never been under this much scrutiny for a job, ever.  Or had my picture taken at one.”

Herc feels like he owes him an apology, but he has more pressing matters on his mind. “How did you know I had a dog?”

“The tie you shoved at me had dog hair on it,” Yancy explains.  “And I didn’t know if it was yours or your son’s.  That’s why I said _the_ dog and not _his_ dog.”

Herc guesses he’s kind of a dick for having underestimated Yancy’s intelligence so severely, but he’s surprised to hear it laid out in such a—a Holmesian fashion. “Good call,” he acknowledges. “And how the fuck does Mako know you?”

Yancy winces. “She doesn’t know me very _well_. She’s a friend of my brother’s, she’s over at his place sometimes.”

“Does she—”

“No.” This is probably the shortest sentence Yancy has delivered all night, and it’s blunt, with none of the humourous affectation Herc has come to expect from him, in the last hour. “Don’t tell her.”

Like he ever fucking would.

The rest of the night is not nearly as worry-free as the last fifteen minutes of that original thirty had been.  Yancy’s lost all his easy charm—it all feels a little forced now, and the falseness of it is what Herc had been afraid of in the first place.  Kid’s back is tense under his hand when he rests it there, eyes gone a little distant, and even though he’s just this edge of still witty enough to be convincing, it’s nothing like it was before.

And Herc is feeling the entirely fatherly urge to sit him down and ask _what’s wrong, son_ , which is absolutely not his place, at all, but you live with your prickly kid for long enough and some shit becomes habit.

Not that Chuck would ever let him _do_ that, but the desire at least is familiar.

“Sorry,” Yancy says as they’re getting back into the car.  “That was totally shit, I swear I’m usually better company than that.”

None of the stiffness leaves his shoulders when the door closes.

Not, Herc reminds himself, that anything about being in the car with him has any right to be calming for Yancy.  Not that that’s his place either.  But he’d thought maybe that being out of the train wreck that the evening had more or less turned into would have helped, and it evidently has not.  “Your brother doesn’t know, then?”

“You have siblings, Herc?”

“Younger brother.”

“Imagine telling him you fuck people for a living and think about whether he’d still look up to you.”

Herc’s pretty sure Scott’s never looked up to him in his life, but it’s a fair point, he supposes. “How long’ve you been doing this, Yancy?”

“Um,” Yancy says, like he’s thinking, and then waves a hand, like it doesn’t matter. “I don’t know. Couple of years. Maybe four.”

“You’re how old?”

“Oh, pushing thirty.” This, at least, seems to be relaxing him, a little bit, the back and forth of it with no acting involved, because he grins, and it at least approaches the ones he’d been throwing out at the beginning of the evening.  “Old enough for it to not be weird for you to have sex with me, but also young enough for it to not be weird for me to call you daddy during.”

Resolutely, Herc does not imagine it.  “Ha, ha,” he says instead. “You’re fifteen years younger than me, that’s not funny.”

“ _Au contraire_ ,” Yancy drawls.  “That is, in fact, what makes it funny.”

“Whatever, mate. Giggle your fucking head off. You want me to drop you somewhere?”

Yancy laughs, sort of, but not much, and Herc thinks to himself with half his mind that the personality Yancy had been flashing around for the show was actually, somehow, much less serious than the one he’s showing now.  “No. I’ll walk home from yours, if you’re serious about not wanting to negotiate anything when you get there. Which, by the way, puts this up there in the top ten weirdest nights I’ve ever had.”

“You know, given the fact that escort services technically are supposed to have _nothing_ to do with the sex trade, you sure mention it a lot. Aren’t you lot supposed to be a bit coy about it?”

Yancy shrugs, and looks out the window.  “Well, since I googled you, I know you’re not a sting operation or a journalist. Also, you didn’t really ask for the boyfriend experience.  You were very specific on the phone, apparently.  Terrified the shit out of John.  And, since you hired me, I figure you’re in no position to judge, so no, I don’t really see the point in being coy.”  His face is flat when he looks back, expressionless, and it strikes Herc that up until this point he may in fact have never seen a genuine emotion on the boy’s face. He’s clearly a proficient actor, after all.  It’s entirely possible that he’s been faking all of them.  “And I don’t think me pointing out what my job actually is has ever shamed someone into not taking me up on it, although, no, I usually don’t.”

And that is probably a little sad, and Herc should feel bad about it, and part of him does, but the rest of him wants to just figure this little fucker out.

Because he can’t quite connect the pieces of Yancy up in his head, the sharp jokester with the practiced liar with the charming people person with the worried boy sitting in the passenger seat of his car, clearly still fretting about something. “Hey,” Yancy says to him after they’ve both been silent a long while.  “Can I have your number before I leave?  I promise I won’t call it unless I have to, but if Mako tells my brother… I don’t want to be able to not back up my story.”  He pauses.  “Please.”

And he looks so fucking earnest Herc just digs out his phone and hands it over.  “Text yourself or something.”

“Thank you. I swear to you, I won’t call unless he’s being a total dick, and I’ll tell him we broke up in a week or something and then I’ll delete it, I promise—”

“Yancy,” Herc tells him, gently, “Shut up.”

For the first time all night, which counts every time the boy has called himself a whore or insinuated that the two of them would be fucking when they got back, Yancy blushes. It’s barely visible, a slight darkening of his face in the grey half-light, and Herc can actually hear the click of his teeth snapping together as he obeys.

And hands the phone back, wordlessly.

Herc resists the temptation to tell him _good boy_ , but it is a close thing.

Because his embarrassment is sort of sweet, in a way.

“Sure I can’t drop you anywhere?” he asks as he pulls up.

“I’m good. Sure I can’t interest you in paying me more for a couple of minutes of my time?  I’ll discount it since I was a shitty date.”

Herc snorts. “As nice as I’m sure a discounted fuck would be, I don’t think my kid would appreciate _hearing_ you stay the night.”

“I can be quiet,” Yancy wheedles, and if the smile weren’t identical to the fake one he’d given some puffed-up Navy Admiral’s wife forty-five minutes ago, it might be convincing. “Kid-friendly, you could say.”

“Go home, Yancy Becket,” Herc tells him, and reaches across the seat divider to ruffle his hair before he turns off the car and ducks out into the night air.

“Oi, Herc!” Chuck’s voice calls from somewhere near the doorway, and both of them glance around, Herc stepping forward as he hears the crunch of Chuck’s feet against the gravel path.  “Took you long enough, old man.  Where’s my fucking dog?”

“What d’you mean, where’s your fucking dog?”

“I mean, _where’s Max_? He’s not in the yard or the house.”

“Well, it’s not like I took him to a fucking military function, is it?  How do you lose something that moans louder’n a—?”

He’s about to say _two-bit whore_ , but then he doesn’t.

Glances over his shoulder, and Yancy’s gone.

If he weren’t looking for it, he wouldn’t see the moving shadow halfway up the street.

“Louder’n _what_?” Chuck is snarling.

“Never mind. Put on your fucking trousers and let’s go find him.”

 

“Hey. Herc.”

It’s only been five days since that stupid function, and the talk he got from Stacker was enough to make him want to move back to fucking Australia, and Chuck’s been ribbing him like it’s going out of style and he’s been avoiding the whole internet even though he knows most of it doesn’t give a damn who he likes to stick it to. And he’s been getting emails from military higher-ups that sound mildly uncomfortable with the whole situation, but which all end with some variation on the theme _my wife thought your butt boy was kind of cute_.  In short, it is way too fucking soon after that stupid function to be hearing Yancy Becket’s voice in a god damned grocery store aisle.

That voice has given him way more trouble than the evening was worth.

But he looks up anyway. “Small world.” Yancy looks about the same out of his suit as he does in it, hair still combed like he’s going somewhere, white button-down tucked into tight jeans.  No suit jacket for the grocery store, and his shoes aren’t near as nice, but ultimately, he looks presentable.  Wearing a pair of square-rimmed glasses.  The kind of guy college girls want to introduce their parents to, or maybe the asshole in Chuck’s philosophy class who always brings Freud into everything who his son can’t stop complaining about.

He looks good. He looks really fucking good, with his shoulders filling out his shirt and probably, if his jeans are as close-fitting in the back as they are in the front, his arse looking every bit as excellent as it had the other night, but then again, he makes his money in looking good, Herc guesses.  “Ha.” Yancy runs his hand through his hair, shifting his basket to his hip. “So—I took your tie by accident, the other night.”

Frankly, Herc is pretty sure Chuck won’t notice until either he has a job interview, a real date, or another robotics meet.

And by that, he means that the kid will have no idea he’s missing his tie for the next four months, until June 3rd, which is the date of the next robotics meet.  “’s apples.  No rush on giving it back, just drop it by whenever ‘s convenient.  Everything work out with your brother?”

Yancy winces, and Herc immediately wishes he hadn’t asked, because it’s going to turn this into a _conversation_. “Sort of? He’s, uh, pissed that I didn’t tell him I had a boyfriend.  He sort of—thought I was straight.”  That wicked smile appears, then disappears so fast Herc almost wonders if he’s imagined it. “He thinks you’re hot.”

Herc blinks at him, unimpressed.

“But he hates your kid.”

“Don’t tell me you know Chuck too.”

“From what I’ve heard about Chuck, I’m pretty sure Chuck would have told you if he knew me.”

And isn’t that the fucking truth.  Herc has to let out a bark of laughter at that, because Yancy has _no idea_ , and he thumbs along the rough line of his jaw, scratching at the stubble. “Yeah, no.  Given how much he’s fucking talked about you this week—”

“Very cute,” Yancy says, nodding with his eyelids dropped like he’s acknowledging it, and comes back up smiling.

His eyes suddenly look a lot bluer than they actually are.

“That’s my son,” Herc chastises him, mostly to distract himself.  Fuck, Chuck’s right.  He needs to get laid.  “D’you fucking mind?”

“Not like I’m hooking up with him,” Yancy protests, but he’s smiling, crooked and amused. “I don’t give it out for free to just anyone and he probably couldn’t afford me.  I’m just saying, he’s cute.”

Herc immediately glances around, even though there’s probably no one else he knows in this grocery store.

When he looks back, Yancy’s rolling his eyes.  “Shame is overrated, Herc.”

 

Yancy drops the tie by a few days later.

Dry-cleaned. That’s nice.

What’s not nice is that Herc comes home to him sitting in the living room across from his son, who grins at him like it’s fucking shark week on the Discovery channel. “How’re you going, Dad?”

Chuck never calls him “Dad” and Yancy’s eyes are avoiding his.  No glasses this time.

“Don’t be a bitch, Chuck,” he says tiredly.

“I’m not sure that’s possible,” Yancy pipes up, and Chuck rounds on him and punches him in the shoulder.

“Oi!” And fuck, that looks like Chuck’s awful version of _friendly_ , and he does not need this.

“Came to bring this back,” Yancy explains, looking a little apologetic, and holds out the god-forsaken blue tie. “And then got taken prisoner.”

“Fuck’s sake, Chuck—”

“Naw,” Chuck says, because he is a sadistic little bastard, and likes embarrassing his father, “This is nice, old man.  Why don’t you come sit down with your boyfriend?”

Herc obligingly walks over, sits down on the couch next to Yancy.  “Boy, you keep your arse glued to that chair.  You can go to your appointment now, Yancy.”

“Appointment?” Yancy asks, then catches on, blinking.  “Appointment. Right.  See ya, babe.”  And he kisses Herc’s cheek, leaning over probably for the express purpose of doing it right in front of Chuck in his full line of sight.  “Appointment.  Nice to meet you, Chuck.”

“See you ‘round,” Chuck calls as the door shuts, which is the most amiable Herc has seen him be with another human being since he was eleven, probably.  The moment Yancy’s feet are heard on the gravel path, he rounds on his father. “You’re not dating that guy.”

“One,” Herc ticks off on his fingers, “I had the dating people who aren’t your mother talk with you when you were fucking thirteen.  Two, stop fucking with the people I’m—dating, it’s not funny.  I can’t ground you anymore, but I can take the car keys away, so don’t push me, boy.”

Chuck waves that off. “I could hot-wire it.” Probably true. “And that’s not what I meant. I mean you and that poncey fucker are not currently dating.  Or fucking. I’d be real fucking shocked if you were a week ago, too.”

“Nose out, Chuck,” Herc grunts, toeing off his boots and grabbing the newspaper off the table, but the thing is, Chuck is definitely smart enough to have figured that out, and he has no doubt if he asked _what makes you say that_ , his boy would pour a mountain of evidence on his head and then stand on top of it laughing like a maniac. “’s none of your business who I’m dating.”

“You pick some random off the street and ask them to come to a military do with you?”

“No, I asked a bloke who took me out for coffee after his run.”

Because he’s not a moron, he knows his son knows everything Mako could possibly tell him.

Chuck’s smile grows, terrifyingly.  He should have drowned the fucking kid at birth, he swears it.  Angela would have killed him, but it would be getting him out of this conversation now, which is turning into gleeful needling on Chuck’s part. “Don’t fucking lie to me, Herc.”

“Go to your fucking room.”

“ _Yancy_ doesn’t _run_ ,” Chuck informs him, smirking.  “You don’t get an arse like that running, and your legs are way fucking better if you do.”

“They’re better wrapped around your waist,” Herc says absently, trying to make his son uncomfortable, but evidently, that doesn’t do it, because Chuck is on a proverbial roll, humiliating him, and he doesn’t want to stop for a little bit of discomforting imagery of his old man having sex which, in fact, did not happen.

“Oh, fuck off. How’d you pick him, take your shirt off on the street and watch who drooled?  Start grabbing asses and find the one bloke who didn’t object?”

The sad thing about this is, it’s probably the most words Chuck has said to him that didn’t involve one of them yelling for several years.

The other sad thing about this is, those are both more dignified ways than how he actually picked Yancy.

He ignores Chuck’s enthusiastic douchebaggery.

Reads his fucking paper and pretends his son isn’t there until the boy starts stumbling under the lack of response, never good at being ignored, and bites out some weak parting insult before he leaves the room.

Wishes he’d never met Yancy Becket.

 

He runs into him the next day.

And, fuck’s sake, Santa Barbara is not this fucking small, which means the universe has it out for him. Herc tries to stay ambivalent on the subject of God, but if the bastard exists, he has a bone to pick with him. Because not only this this the second time in a week he’s run into him… he’s walking Max.

And Yancy is running.

(Which, by the way, is something it’s difficult not to want to rub right into his know-it-all son’s face.)

Yancy appears to have no intention of stopping and talking to him, which is probably the best plan, but the moment he realizes the irony of the situation is obvious, because his face spasms and as he passes, he starts laughing helplessly.

Herc’s going to ignore it.

Which is probably the best plan.

But it’s hard not to be interested in those shorts, so he turns around after only a few seconds.

Yancy is leaning against the wall a stone’s throw away, bent over double with his hands on his knees, gasping for breath through his laughter.  It must be hard to run when you can barely manage to take in air like a human being. Herc suspects if he could stop laughing long enough to give it a try, he’d sound like Max, who is wheezing against his left shin.

He crosses his arms over his chest and waits for Yancy to stop.

But the second he does, and notices that Herc is watching him, he just starts all over again. “Try not to choke on your tongue,” Herc tells him, and Yancy takes in a deep breath, straightening and pushing his sweaty hair out of his face.

“You want to go get coffee with me?” he asks, all the air still missing from his voice.

Then he starts laughing like an idiot again.

Part of Herc wants to tell him to pull himself together, but part of him wants to kiss him until he stops laughing, because even when he looks like shit, covered in sweat and messy, he ‘s still got one hell of a body.  Most of him, though, is struggling not to start laughing too. “Mate, you find me a shop with an outdoors seating area and I’ll even pay for it.”

He’s not sure why he says it. Maybe it’s the running shorts, but probably not, because he’s forty fucking four, not fifteen. Maybe he wants to shut Yancy up. If that’s what it is, it works. He actually shuts up so fast that he cuts off laughing in the middle of what is actually a very unattractive rasping noise.

Then he grimaces, shrugs one shoulder. “Ha.  See you, Herc.”

And takes a drink from his water bottle.

And keeps running the way he was running.

It is neither, Herc reminds himself, a surprise nor a disappointment.

 

It’s a nice bar, really—doesn’t serve anything with alcohol that isn’t fucking _fruity_ , but whatever—and Herc and Stacker, in full military uniform, are sitting down one end of it, working off twin headaches about bureaucracy by drinking and bitching, not that it ever seems that undignified or friendly in the moment. It feels, like many things to do with Stacker, a little like he’s still at work, but it’s more like a sane conversation by the water cooler than a meeting with the boss, so it could be worse.

“Mr. Becket is here,” Stacker tells him, pointing over his shoulder and tipping one eyebrow upwards, an expression that tells him his friend is watching his reaction very carefully.

Yancy is leaning against the other end of the bar, wearing those same grey suit pants, this time in a vest instead of a suit jacket, head tipped into the wall next to him, halfway to drifting off to sleep.  “Huh. I didn’t know he’d be out tonight.”

He hasn’t bothered to try and feed Stacker some breakup story yet, even though it’s been nearly three weeks, because for one, lying to the man is an Olympic event, and for two, the words _I didn’t think it was fair to Yancy to bring someone else_ had come out of his mouth, and he needs a little while to live that down before he just goes, _fucking whoops, that’s all over, I was wrong when I said it was serious a couple of weeks ago_. “I see,” Stacker says slowly. “You know, Hercules, you never told me when you met him.”

“Um, ‘bout a month before the do,” Herc lies, and then claps him on the shoulder.  “I’ll be right back.”

Stacker might be playing the role of “friend” tonight, but his stare is still drilling through Herc’s spine.

“Yancy,” he says.

Yancy starts upright, blinking sleepily, and then seems surprised all over again when he registers Herc’s presence.  “Are you following me?”

“Very fucking witty,” Herc tells him.

Yancy yawns, crosses his arms over his chest.  It stretches the open top buttons of his shirt apart a little.  “Look, I just woke up like an hour ago, I tried. What do you want?”

Privately, Herc thinks an hour ought to be enough to get anybody up, especially anybody who woke up at seven in the fucking evening.  “The Marshal’s here with me.  He spotted you. I figured it was best I came over and said something so it didn’t look off.”

Yancy gives him a strange flat look, leans a little closer to him so he can lower his voice and it won’t look odd.  It also puts him right into his space, but he guesses he’ll just accept that.  “Look,” he starts, sounding a little apologetic. “You seem like a nice guy and everything, but I have had literally nothing but trouble trying to keep my job hidden from my brother and not out the whole thing as fake to Mako at the same time since I went to your thing.”

“That makes two of us.”

“Yeah, okay, but I’m gonna be the asshole,” Yancy says, waving his hand and quirking up one corner of a smile that is not the slightest bit humourous or heartfelt. “Unless you’re going to pay me again, I don’t really feel obligated to pretend to be your boyfriend for your son or your boss or whoever.  And I’m actually waiting on someone now, so if you could, you know, not cut my line of sight to the door, that would be great.”

Processing that isn’t actually difficult.

But Herc takes a minute to do it anyway.  “I’m not asking you to, mate.”

“You kind of are,” Yancy points out.  “I mean, the house was my bad, with Chuck, I’ll give you that one, but right now, this is all you using me to make a point with the Marshal.”  He taps Herc’s shoulder to move him to the side and then recrosses his arms, eyes fixed on the door.

So yeah, all the charming snarkiness was manufactured, probably, all the grins, but given the circumstances, Herc is, again, neither surprised nor disappointed.

All right, maybe a little disappointed.

But not that fucking shocked.

“Yeah,” he concedes. “That’s fair.  I’ll leave you to it.”

Tucks a ten-dollar bill into the pocket of Yancy’s vest as he turns to leave, and figures that’s fair, too.

Doesn’t notice the embarrassed, incredulous look that quickly fades from Yancy’s face as Stacker’s eyes fall over it.

He’s never been any fucking good with people.

 

He’s never been any fucking good with people.

Which is probably why Herc doesn’t think about it near as much as he did the first time before he calls the escort service for the next time he’s required to have dinner with some ranked fuck in a suit who couldn’t shoot a gun to save his fucking life. Half because it’s with two of the older idiots whose wives had practically giggled themselves to death over Yancy’s dumb little quips, half because he actually does feel a little bad about all the trouble he’s caused the man.

Even if he’s still getting every bit of that trouble back.

And yeah, maybe a little bit because he’s got a bit of a thing for the boy.

Not an emotional thing, because he’s not enough of a cliché to fall for a hooker, but Yancy is a very pretty boy, and he’s not so fucking terrible as company either. And he wins points, somehow, even with elderly, homophobic people.

And besides, hiring one male prostitute has to be slightly better than hiring two.

Yancy’s still wearing his grey suit, this time with the vest too, under it, and he’s already got a tie on.  The fact that it’s hot pink could be a jab, whether at them or him it’s unsure, but Herc is going to try not to read too much into it.  “The attitude isn’t much of a draw, huh?” are his first words, and they come with that gorgeous little smirk.

Herc refrains from an eye roll narrowly, and pulls one corner of his lips back instead to expose his teeth, eyes lidding halfway in as expressive a face of exasperation as the eye roll ever would have been.  “Figured we could pay each other back for all the trouble.”

“You know, you didn’t think any of this through very well,” Yancy tells him as he gets into the car. “The pain in the ass it’s been for me is mostly coincidental, yours is sort of all your fault.”

He can’t really argue with that, so he just grunts.

“Didn’t say he believed me.” And Yancy apparently takes that as his cue to shut up, for a while. “A while” is the operative phrase. It’s not like he’s really that much of a talker, but in comparison to Herc, most people seem to be. “Hey, so, things went okay with the Marshal, right?”

“Yeah.”

Yancy doesn’t apologize. Herc doesn’t expect him to. He understands the rules of business. “Told him it was your sister.”

Yancy’s mouth, which he’s trying not to watch, twitches.  “She was Latina.”

That gets him a laugh, at least.  “You tell him I’m adopted?”

In reality, Herc had just shrugged and said _a friend, I guess,_ and all of this is bullshit, but the laugh’s enough to convince him to keep the joke up.  “No.  Didn’t reckon you could fake it well enough when push came to shove.”

“ _Estou insultado_.”

“Takes more than a little Spanish to cut that bit of acting, Yancy,” he says after a moment of silence.

“You’re right, sir,” Yancy says, mouth twitching again as he glances out the window. “That was Portuguese.”

“Unless you’re my subordinate officer, don’t call me ‘sir’,” Herc tells him instead of responding to that. The truth is that he doesn’t have a response to that, his mind doesn’t move that quick to banter. “And for fuck’s sake, don’t do it in public.”

“I was going to join the Air Force,” Yancy says idly, glancing at the houses they’re passing out the window with his neck stretched out from where it’s leaning against his fist. “So hey, I was close, wasn’t I?”

Herc suspects it’s another joke, because it comes with one attached.  The beginning of a shitty come-on, maybe.  “Oh, were you.”

“Yeah.” Yancy shrugs and looks back at him, then grins.  “Mile-high club, Herc, I’m sure you know the drill.”

“No, son, I do not,” Herc tells him without any humour, not because there’s nothing humourous about it—although, really, it’s not original at all—but because he doesn’t feel he should afford that any encouragement.

“See, ‘son’ is actually kinkier than ‘sir’, I think.”

“Do you have some sort of a script for this job that tells you to proposition me every five seconds, or is that all your personal touch?”

Yancy snorts. “That wasn’t a proposition, that was blatant innuendo.  Invitational, yes, but not a proposition.  And yes, that’s how I get paid.  Why, would you like me to actually proposition you?”

“Please don’t.”

“I feel like you actually would appreciate the direct approach,” Yancy continues like he hasn’t heard him, sounding thoughtful as if he is not talking about coaxing the man next to him into paying him for sex.  “You’re not really very subtle.”

“Says the man wearing a hot pink tie,” Herc says, and parks the car.

Yancy starts climbing out of the car, but then leans back in.  “One,” he says, “My hot pink tie looks awesome, and two, the amount you’ve already paid me renders the extra maybe five minutes it would take me to suck you off when we get back insignificant.”

The math works out to twenty-five dollars, American.

Herc tries to avoid thinking about it and ultimately fails, instead looks everywhere but Yancy’s ass as he pulls himself out of the car, in the manner that makes it the most difficult to _not look at his ass_.

Not for the first time, he wonders why he cares.

Really, it’s not like he’s morally above this.

Instead of pondering it right before he knocks on the door of some puffed-up three-star Navy piece of shit, he fires back. “Five minutes?  Y’don’t think much of my stamina, do you.”

“Clearly you’ve never experienced my mouth,” Yancy tells him, turning on him, and the smile on his face with his half-lidded eyes is more alluring than it has any right to be. “And the phrase you’re looking for is _estou insultado_.  Shall I say it slower?  Some people like that.”

If this is what “more direct” means—

Then Yancy was right, he does appreciate the more direct approach.

As they follow the Admiral’s wife through the parlour, he notices that Yancy is limping a little, although his voice is no less animated than it should be.  It’s subtle—probably, Herc admits to himself, something he wouldn’t have noticed if he hadn’t been staring at the way those pants fit him. When he sits down, it’s ginger—but he’s good enough that his face doesn’t change and his greetings to the others don’t hitch.

Herc’s surprised he remembers all of their names, because _he_ doesn’t.

He’s tempted to ask _are you all right_ , but figures if Yancy’s going to such considerable length to hide the fact that there’s anything wrong with him, he probably shouldn’t. One of the three women, though—Herc figures her name is probably something like Nancy or Susan or something suburban like that—has no such qualms.  “Are you all right?” she asks.  “We can get you another chair, dear, if—”

“No,” Yancy tells her, and his smile is winning, if entirely fake.  “It’s fine, I just fell at work the other day and I’m still walking it off.”

Herc sincerely doubts that’s true, but whatever works.

The man standing by his right shoulder makes a disparaging noise that makes Herc glad he’s a patient man, because if he weren’t, he wouldn’t be standing for the disdain. “And what is it you do again?”

“Hotel management,” Yancy lies smoothly.  “I was walking backwards while giving a tour and tripped over an extension cord. Not,” he adds, and laughs, like he’s cueing the rest of them to laugh too, “My finest moment.”

The room gives up the laugh he’d asked for, and it’s real, but it seems artificial to Herc, who knows Yancy is playing them all.

That said, he’s playing them well.

Really well. For all most of his conduct the other night had been forced and slightly too stiff, it now comes effortlessly—he has the wives eating out of his hand in fifteen minutes at the outside, and by halfway through dinner the crusty old military bastards are at least not glaring at him every time he smiles at one of them.  The charm is easy and enchanting.

It’s difficult not to get sucked in.

Even for such a consummate stoic as Hercules Hansen.

He guesses that’s how he knows Yancy is actually good at his job—that for minutes at a time it’s easy to put out of his mind that the boy is a hooker and not a man he’s actually dating.

It’s a little harder when they’re leaving and Herc settles a hand on the small of his back to steer him towards the door.

Yancy doesn’t quite flinch.

But his face twitches, a little.  Like he’s in pain.

“All right, what’s up,” Herc asks when they’re getting back into the car.

“What do you mean?”

Herc gives him a look that says _don’t play dumb_ , because Yancy’s made such a point of making sure he knows he isn’t that there’s no point in it now.  “What’d you fucking do to yourself?  Not that bullshit about the extension cord.”

That was so long ago now that Yancy actually frowns like he doesn’t remember for a moment before he catches on.  “—oh. No, that’s actually true, I did do that the other day.”

Herc snorts before he can stop himself.

And Yancy doesn’t seem too pleased about that, because his voice is, very lightly, edged when he continues, if only for the first few words.  “Yes, I have a day job.  I have to pay the rent somehow.”

“What, three hundred an hour plus odds and ends isn’t enough to pay the rent?”

“I’m putting my brother and sister through college,” Yancy says, and flicks his eyes over to the window for a moment.  He does that a lot, Herc is beginning to notice.  Looking at the sky.

He wonders if the Air Force story was true.

“Yeah?”

“Yeah,” Yancy says softly, and his smile this time is less wild and more genuinely fond, but it’s not directed at him.  “They both started the same year.  Gonna graduate next year. My sister’s going to go to medical school. She’s full-ride right now, but you know, she still has to, like, eat and stuff, and her internship’s unpaid. You have a kid in college, you know how it is.”

Herc refrains from laughing only by biting his tongue.  “Chuck doesn’t exactly interview well.”

“So maybe you don’t know how it is.”

He glances over and raises his eyebrow, because Yancy is looking him dead in the eye. “You tell this story to all the lads?”

“No,” Yancy tells him, voice honest. “Usually I make one up. But there’s not really any point with you, since your son knows my brother and apparently talks about me.” He pauses, then arches one eyebrow and curls up a corner of his mouth, all the fondness gone out of his smile, replaced with the desire to amuse.  “You would think no one would pay for my life story, but self-disclosure is a big part of emotional intimacy, according to my brother’s psychology textbook from two years ago. It stands to reason that fake self-disclosure would be a big part of fake intimacy.  So you’d be wrong.”

Herc wants to tell him _please stop talking_ or some variation on that theme.

Because he knows he’s not supposed to care.

But his mouth is fighting with him to curve upwards anyway.  So he lets it.

“Yes!” Yancy crows the moment he catches sight of the smile.  “Finally!”

It wasn’t even that fucking funny. Wasn’t even really funny at all.

“Don’t be too proud of yourself.”

Yancy’s grinning, and for a moment it’s actually too wide to be at all attractive, which Herc takes to mean it’s real.  “Too late. I’ve been trying to do that forever. That’s usually the part I’m good at.”

“What, making people smile?”

“Yep,” Yancy says. “Best part of this job.”

“What’s the worst part of it?”

For a moment, no answer comes. “—I mean, I have it pretty good, as far as jobs go, really.  I could be doing a lot worse things.  But you know, occupational hazards—some people aren’t nice to me. I have full control over it, though, which is the sort of ‘worse things’ I’m talking about. Girls walking the streets, they don’t really get that.  I get to negotiate without worrying about the fee.”  He exhales quietly.  “But on the other hand, I can charge a whole hell of a lot extra for the really fucked up shit.”

Herc’s morbidly curious about what the “really fucked up shit” is, but he doesn’t ask. It’s not really his business.

None of this is really his business.

So he keeps his mouth shut the rest of the car ride, and Yancy follows suit.  Oh, he can feel those grey-blue eyes tracing his profile from time to time, but he makes a point of not looking over.

“You know,” Yancy says as they’re pulling up to the house, “You really are the weirdest job I’ve ever had.”

“Thanks.”

Instead of responding to the sarcasm, Yancy opens the door on his side and says, “You’re welcome.” Pauses before he gets out, glances back across his shoulder.  “Don’t suppose you’re planning on inviting me in.”

It would be really fucking easy to say yes.  And he doesn’t have anything to prove to anyone.

And it’s not like Yancy’s going to be pissed about it.

But he thinks he wants to stay the weirdest job Yancy’s ever had.

“Wasn’t,” he says, and shrugs one shoulder.  “But if you need a drink after that dog and pony show and you still feel like discounting something, then I could be convinced.”

He thinks he sees Yancy flash him a grin before he twists back around and hauls himself out of the car. “Hell, if you’re going to give me a drink I’ll give you the fifteen minutes free.”  He hesitates, and looks at Herc over the top of the car as he slams it.  “Unless your insane son is going to be there.  In which case I’m charging you double.”

Herc snorts. That, he thinks, would be a discount in and of itself.  Putting up with Chuck is worth at least triple.  “It’s Friday night, he’s got better shit to do than sit at home and snipe at me.”

And, true to form, Chuck’s not there.

Bless the absent little bastard.

Max, though, Max is there, wiggling around his feet the second he gets the door open and then going straight for Yancy’s legs.

He recognizes that hip wiggle and swoops in to pick up the dog before he can piss all over everything, striding across the living room to toss the little fucker out the back door so he can do his business out there.

When he turns back, Yancy’s got his jacket tossed over his arm and is rolling up his sleeves to his elbows. “Max, right?” he says, and waves a post-it note.  “This was on the table. Says he’s been fed, but not walked? I think.  The handwriting’s kind of terrible.”

“Great, well, he can waddle around out back for a while, then.”

“Say ‘outback’ again.”

“Crikey, mate,” Herc says flatly, shrugging out of his jacket and walking down the hall to toss it onto the bed.  “That’s a right big croc behind me.”

From behind him, Yancy laughs.

He wonders if that’s fake, too.

“Say ‘the dingo ate my baby’ next,” Yancy calls after him.

“Maybe if you say ‘nuc-u-ler’ first.”

“That was one guy!” Yancy protests, but he’s laughing again when Herc reemerges.  “And I wasn’t even old enough to vote for him.”

“ _None_ of us got to fucking vote for Steve Irwin.” He opens the fridge and tosses over a can of beer, which Yancy only narrowly catches, eyes widening as he bends for it. He drops his jacket in the process and winces again when he has to crouch down to get it.  “How many days ago did you fall, mate?”

Yancy appears to be unduly amused by the can in his hand.  “Um, Tuesday, I think.”

“What, and you’re still wincing everywhere you go?”

“For the sake of full disclosure, I’m also covered in belt bruises,” Yancy says casually, popping the top on the beer and raising it to his lips.  “Which was, like, yesterday.  Didn’t think you’d want that out there in the room full of people you have to work with, but I’ll reconsider the option next time.”

Herc just drinks his beer and doesn’t respond to that one.

There just isn’t a good response to it.

“Hey, should I let him back in?” Yancy asks, pointing at the door as he pulls his tie out of his vest with the other hand and starts undoing it.  Herc glances at the door and sees Max’s dopey grinning face staring back at him through the glass.

“Yeah, sure. If you don’t mind that suit being slobbered all over.”

“It’s fine. Worse things have been on it.” Max comes barreling through the door and resumes panting all over Yancy’s ankles.  “Aw.  He’d be cute if he didn’t look like somebody’d kicked his face in.”

Herc files that description away for safekeeping, because it’s fucking hilarious. “Don’t say that to Chuck. He’ll have your balls.”

“There are worse fates.”

“What have I told you about that being my fucking son?”

Yancy looks up from Max at him and smiles around the rim of the can he has at his mouth as soon as he finishes speaking.  “That he is?”

Herc stares at him for a moment and swallows what is probably an unreasonable amount of cheap beer to have in one go, deliberately not looking at the now-barely-exposed hollow of Yancy’s collarbone.  “To lay off him.”

“Do you see him here?”

Thank every saint that exists that he does not.

“You’d never have made it in the Air Force.  You’re an irreverent little fuck.” He watches Yancy laugh into the mouth of the can, and doesn’t smile at it even a little, although he wants to.  “That’s not a compliment.”

“I’m gonna take it as one anyway.  Since I’m not in the Air Force.”  Yancy shrugs. “Besides, I’m usually much less irreverent.”

Herc rolls his eyes and tosses his empty can at the bin, then kneels down for Max to come over and slobber all over him.  “I feel so fucking special.”

“You should,” Yancy says, so quietly he almost misses it, as he’s walking past him to take a position ten feet from the bin and makes the shot like he’s trying to sink a fucking layup.  “I should get going.”

“Right-o,” Herc says, and stands, struggling against the old-man-righting-himself groan that Chuck always teases him about.  “Door’s that way.”

“I know,” Yancy says, and walks back past him, stopping a few feet short.  “I just walked through it.”

Then he steps forward and shifts his coat and tie into his other hand.  Herc can kind of tell what he’s doing, but he doesn’t move away as Yancy uses his now-free right hand to pull Herc down by the back of the neck and kiss him without a word, slow enough he has time to protest.

And he should, but he doesn’t.

It’s not long.

Long enough for him to get his hands on that waist, tapered by the vest to twin convenient curves that almost encourage the action, and contemplate pulling him forward, but not long.

Yancy pulls away with a light grin on his face, and raises his eyebrows before he turns around and walks towards the door.  “Call that payment for the beer,” he says over his shoulder as he slips his jacket back on and opens the door.

“On the house,” Herc replies, but the door’s already closed behind him and his feet are already sounding on the path outside.

He drops onto the couch, rubbing the nape of his neck where Yancy’s fingers were.

He’s pretty fucking sure _that_ wasn’t in Yancy’s fucking job description.

 

His phone rings just as he’s about to go to bed—at ten on a weekend, he knows, Chuck would be fucking disappointed, but Chuck’s not fucking here, is he?

He’s on the phone, though. Or at least that’s what caller ID says.

But it’s Yancy’s voice that says, “Hey,” when he picks up.

“Why the hell are you calling me from Chuck’s phone?”

_Why the hell are you calling me at all?_

“Um, well. Sorry to interrupt, but Chuck’s sort of smashed, and he’s over at my place, so—”

“I told you to leave him the fuck alone,” Herc growls into the phone, irritation rising.

“What? No, man, look, Mr. Hansen, I can’t drive him home, I don’t have a car, and he keeps trying to punch me, I can’t keep him here, can you come get him?”

 _Mr. Hansen_?  With Chuck there?

“Well, you never told me where you lived, so no.”

“Uh—I’ll text you the address. Are you coming?”

“Keep your fucking trousers on. I know that’s hard for you.”

That’s probably rude, or too far, but fuck it, he’s annoyed and Yancy wasn’t supposed to call him, let alone get his son drunk.  Probably his brother, whatever his name is, is involved, but Yancy should have better fucking sense.

Still, he guesses he should be grateful he got called at all.

“Um,” Yancy says, and his blush is almost audible over the phone, “This is Raleigh, Mr. Hansen.”

 _Fuck_.

“Thought you were your brother,” he explains, rubbing his hand over his eyes.  “I’ll be there as soon as I can be.  Send me the address.”

“—isn’t my brother with _you_?”

Herc goes quiet.

Because no, he isn’t.

And he was never supposed to be.

“I’ll see you shortly, Becket.”

Hangs up.

 _Fuck_.

When he knocks on the door of the apartment, the guy who answers is clearly Raleigh Becket—his resemblance to his brother is only passing, but it’s there.  Prettier face, flushed cheeks—he’s clearly not totally sober himself—wearing an ugly fucking sweater and with a bruise blooming on his jawbone.  “Mr. Hansen,” he says. “He’s—Mako’s got him, thanks for coming.”

He doesn’t say anything about his brother, and privately, Herc is grateful for that.

Chuck lurches out of Mako’s grip the moment he sees him, swinging for the head.

He ducks the first punch, grabs the second one, and puts his son in a full nelson, possible only with such ease because the boy is drunk off his arse.  “What the fuck were you lot doing?”

“Watching hockey,” Raleigh says, slowly.  “Yancy said he couldn’t come because he had a date.  I figured you—?” His big blue eyes widen as the obvious conclusion that Yancy’s date was not with Herc seems to dawn on him. “Oh.  Um.”

Herc doesn’t say anything to that.

He could try to lie, but he doesn’t even know what he’s supposed to lie about.  Say Yancy’s back home?  Say he’d left the restaurant to come get his drunk son?  Say they were an open relationship?  Something?

Chuck is struggling, wrists tugging against the hold that he can’t break because Herc always has been stronger than him and probably will be for a good few more years. “Y’re a wanker, _Dad_ ,” he slurs, and Herc ignores him roundly.

“You want me to take her home too?” he asks, because Mako’s got pink high in her cheeks, she was probably drinking too.

“I figured she could stay the night since she wasn’t trying to kill me, um,”  Raleigh says, but he sounds awkward, and he won’t quite look Herc in the eye anymore.  “Sorry for bothering you?”

“F’cking right,” Chuck mutters.

“Belt up, Charlie,” Herc tells him.

Drags him backwards out the door.

Calls the number Yancy texted on his phone months ago while they’re in the car, his boy strapped down and partway to nodding off in the seat next to him.

He doesn’t pick up. It goes straight to voicemail. _Hey, this is Yancy. I’m probably off doing something way more fun than answering my phone.  Or I’m at work.  Either way, leave me a message and I’ll get back to you_.

Herc knows exactly where he is— _at work,_ like he said, which is bizarrely irritating—but he wants to give him a heads up about his brother.

So he leaves a message.

“Becket.  Call me back.”

Hangs up again.

“Dad,” Chuck says, pathetically, from the seat next to him, and bends over to throw up in the footwell.

Fucking fantastic.

 

Yancy doesn’t call him back until mid-morning the next day, sounding tired.  “Hey. Raleigh already called me to chew me out.” He laughs across the line, but he doesn’t sound amused.  “You’re off the hook, dude.”

“Don’t call me that. What’d you tell him?”

“The truth,” Yancy replies, and just as Herc’s starting to think _shit_ , he continues, laughing that same laugh.  “Not the whole truth. But I didn’t know what you told him or what you wanted to tell him, and then I figured, here’s your out. So I told him I was out with another guy.  Which I was. He’ll tell Mako, she’ll tell her dad or your kid, one of them’ll tell you, you ‘break up’ with me. It’s easy.”

It is, Herc grudgingly admits. He’d had no fucking idea how to do it because lying to Stacker is fucking ridiculous, and the whole connection through Mako would have made it difficult to coordinate their story without some serious effort, which neither of them had really wanted to put in—

So yeah. It’s a fortuitous coincidence. It’s a good idea.

But Yancy sounds like he’s stretched thin, so there’s something wrong with it. “What’s the catch?”

“No catch. Usually people side with the one who got cheated on, right?  So you’d be in the clear.  It would tie up all the loose ends, sort of.  Or at least make them irrelevant.”

“Talk to me like a person and not a business decision, Yancy Becket.”

“You _are_ a business decision,” Yancy snaps. “You’re the worst business decision I’ve ever made.”  There’s silence on the line for a moment, and then he starts talking again, apology in his voice. “Fuck, I’m sorry. I didn’t get a whole lot of sleep last night; I’m just cranky.  Didn’t mean to yell.”

The boy’s stressed. It’s understandable.

Doesn’t mean Herc isn’t forcing back annoyance.

He doesn’t know why he’s annoyed; nothing Yancy said was untrue.

This is a fucking business transaction.

Or it was one, anyway.

“Right,” he says after he realizes he’s been quiet too long.

Yancy jumps right back on it, as if he hasn’t already been very clear about what he thinks of Herc. “What did you mean, talk to you like a person?”

“I mean, stop trying to sell me by reading me the benefits and tell me whatever you’re not telling me.” Stacker operates on logic and reason and cost-benefit analyses; Herc has always been more of an impulse and play-fast-and-loose-with-the-morals-and-gut-feelings guy.

“Does that really matter?”

“Out with it, Yancy.”

There’s a quiet moment. Then a quiet voice. “I hate lying to him. I’ve always hated it. And I hate what he thinks about this. But it’s better than the truth. I’ll get over it, I’m just a little tense right now.”

“Come over here,” Herc tells him, sighing, and rakes his hand through his short hair. “Let’s figure the story out proper before we start getting tangled up again.”

“Right now?” Yancy asks, but it’s more softly whiny than an actual protest.

“Yeah, right now.”

“Yeah. Yeah, okay.  I’ll be over sometime in the next hour.”

“Great. See you then.”

Yancy hangs up before he gets the chance to.

“Chuck,” he yells upstairs, and his son answers him with a groan.  “Chuck!  Get your arse out of bed!”

Chuck appears a few moments later at the top of the stairs, hair sticking up ridiculously on one side, eyes bleary and bloodshot.  “What the fuck do you want?”

“I’ll give you fifty bucks and the car keys to get your kit on and get the fuck out of the house for a couple of hours.”

Chuck glares at him. “Are you fucking kidding me?”

“I cleaned your bile out of the carpeting in my fucking car last night.  Do me a fucking favour.”

“You’re having your hooker over again, aren’t you?”  Herc stares at him blankly, and Chuck grunts and wanders back into his room. “I’m not a fucking idiot,” he yells down the stairs, and Herc wonders whether he’s just lucky enough to not feel the noise headache effects of a hangover, or whether he’s ignoring them in favour of being a dick.  He also wonders what exactly Chuck means by that, but he doesn’t have to ask, because the kid thunders down the stairs ten minutes later with his clothes on and his face shaved, talking while he’s grabbing the keys and the money from his fingers.  “I went out the night you two went to what’s-his-face’s and brought a girl back. I could hear you fuckers talking about discounts and charging double out the fucking window, and I’m _not a fucking idiot_.”

Herc often thinks that Chuck’s performance in school is purely due to easy tests and his son knowing how to work the system, but other times, he’s forced to acknowledge that his son is not, in fact, a fucking idiot at all.  “What, and you just decided to keep that to yourself?”

“I’m not a _complete_ cunt,” Chuck scoffs as he walks out the door. “I didn’t tell anybody. But believe me, now I’m sure it wasn’t some fucked up roleplaying game, I’m taking the mickey out of you the second I get back, you desperate fossil.”

Herc would yell at him over being a disrespectful little prick, but the door’s already closed.

And Chuck never listens to yelling anyhow.

 

Yancy rings the bell and it’s the least put-together Herc has ever seen him look, wearing a loose t-shirt and cargo shorts instead of the shit he usually seems to favour, shoulders hunched and face looking older than it usually does.  When he walks in, silently, he’s limping again, not bothering to hide it this time.

“Y’look like hell,” Herc tells him, because he does.  “Want a beer?”

“Thanks,” Yancy replies, and laughs, humourlessly.  “Got anything stronger?”

He does, but he’s not wasting it midmorning.  “Chuck keeps vodka.”

“I’d kill for some.”

So Herc goes right ahead into the upper cabinet and grabs that bottle Chuck thinks he doesn’t know about.

Serves him fucking right for that fossil comment.

“Sorry about biting your head off,” Yancy says when he passes over the glass.  “Like I said, not a whole lot of sleep was had last night. And I’d literally just come off the phone with my angry kid brother.”

Herc sits in the seat across from him—it’s Chuck’s chair, and Yancy’s sitting in his, but it doesn’t matter. “No, you were right. This was a bad go from start to finish.”

“You would not fucking believe how bad,” Yancy groans, and puts his head in one hand before he knocks back a mouthful of straight vodka, doesn’t even wince as it goes down.

His bottom lip is split, just a little.

It’s hard not to watch his mouth.

“I’m pretty sure I would.”

Yancy studies him for a moment, tongue appearing for a moment to collect the remnants of his last swallow from his lips.  “Yeah, maybe you would. This,” he gestures between them briefly, “is free, by the way, in case you were worried I’d try to extort money from you. It’s my problem as much as yours, although, in the grand scheme of things, your friends knowing you hired a whore is probably slightly further towards the less bad end of the spectrum than your friends knowing you _are_ a whore.”

“You like that word too much, Yancy.”

“I don’t like it,” Yancy says simply.  “It’s just the truth.”

For a few moments, those pretty eyes slip shut, and everything is silent while he watches Yancy’s mouth on the rim of the glass.

“We gonna ‘figure out the story proper’, or you bring me here to stare at me?” Yancy asks, and finally grins.  “Because that I would consider charging you for.”

Herc doesn’t reward him for that shitty joke, because he’s tired of the shitty jokes about Yancy’s fucking job. “Don’t bullshit me, Yancy.”

“Bullshitting people is sort of what I do.”

Herc stares at the boy until that false smile fades and Yancy subsides into taking another drink. “Right.  Now, I agree we need to stop—“ What the hell is this, exactly? He waves his hand, vaguely. “—this.  It’s taking it out of the both of us. Now—”

And that’s about as many words as he usually strings together, and he’s actually not sure what he wants to say after that, so he breaks off, putting his words together in his head before he says them, patiently plotting out the rest of this stupid-ass discussion. He doesn’t realize how long he’s actually been quiet until, Yancy, halfway through tipping his glass to his lips again, waiting for him to say something, examines his face and starts laughing, this time both real and hard.  “Oh my god, Herc, you’re shit at this ‘talking’ thing.”

“Fine,” Herc says, and raises his glass like he’s about to toast.  “Your go, then.”

Yancy rolls his eyes. “All right.  So, you want to get out of this without your various military buddies and spawn finding out you hired me, I want to get out of this without my brother knowing you hired me, and those two things are related, so we need to balance them, and that’s what you missed on Glee.” He pretends to be amused, briefly, by his own joke, then sets down his glass and waves his hand to the side. “We have a convenient way to get out of the whole mess by just disconnecting entirely via you ‘breaking up’ with me because I ‘cheated’ on you.”  He raises one hand and starts ticking off fingers.  “Cons include your friends concluding all gay men are, in fact, sluts, and maybe talking some shit behind your back about knowing it wouldn’t last or your inability to keep me satisfied and my brother hating me for being the figurative kind of whore.”

Herc clears his throat, but Yancy doesn’t stop, raising his other hand and ticking off fingers on that as well.  “Pros include you getting out of this mess, me getting out of this mess, me going back to actually doing my job without wondering how I’m going to lie to my brother about you this time, you not having to fake liking me in front of your friends—which, by the way, you could use some coaching, because shit, you are bad at pretending to be affectionate too—you getting to not pay me more than a grand a night to not do my job, et cetera, I’m out of fingers, you get the point.”

He takes a deep breath, and Herc just watches him to see if he’s going to start talking again, which he does.  “So now that we’ve established that this is the smart way out, I propose the following: we fuck, then we wait around for your kid to get home and you yell at me or something, I leave in disgrace, we wait for him to disseminate the word and I tell my brother I told you the truth because I felt bad and you broke up with me. Then you never hire me again. And maybe just get your own date next time.  That way I come out of it looking slightly less bad for Raleigh, because I came clean, and your whole problem gets solved by you giving anyone who ever mentions me that ‘you fucking idiot’ look you’re giving me now.”

And wasn’t all that just a fucking mouthful.  He gets the impression, too, that Yancy isn’t really the babbling sort, although certainly he’s talkative, so that would have been mostly pointed shit, but it’s still a lot to process at once.  Herc is not the sort who gets his information in a large block, he’s more of a minute-to-minute operator. “I don’t see what step one has to do with any of this.”

“Oh, I just want to do that,” Yancy says, and waves his hand again.  “I need to burn off some stress and I like you.  Also, you really need to get some, man.  It’s not really relevant to the plan, though.”

Herc will tackle _that_ one in a hot minute.  “ _Right_ , well, Chuck knows about this, so there’s that to consider too.”

Yancy flinches, what little relaxation there had been in his face a moment ago gone, lips thinning and paling, colour rising to his cheeks.  “You’re—”

“I wouldn’t worry about it. Apparently he’s known for a bit. Think he’ll keep his mouth shut.”

Although, he probably should have told Chuck to do that before he’d left.  He’s not really worried, because, like he’d said himself, the boy’s not really not a complete cunt, but he probably ought to have anyway.

Yancy rubs his hand across his eyes, looking tired, and then he bolts back the remainder of his vodka like it’s not even affecting him.  “Every time I think I get a handle on this fucking thing you pull the rug out from under my feet again.  We can use my brother instead, then.  He’ll tell Mako.”

There’s probably some problem, but Herc guesses they’ll find that when they fucking trip over it, because that seems to be their pattern.  “Sounds solid enough.”

“You know, usually people pay for the boyfriend experience for themselves, not everybody else. You’re like the third person who actually wanted me to act for _other_ people, and I get like, three or four jobs a week.  For four years.”  Yancy sighs and gets up, crossing the room to put his glass in the sink, rinsing it out first, something which, despite nearly twenty-two years of raising the little bastard, he can never get Chuck to do.  “I’m never taking another one of these again.”

“The _third_?”

“Yeah, there was a girl who was going to a high school reunion and a guy who wanted to piss off his parents.  So you’re third. But those were like, one-night finite shit, and you know, they wanted it for themselves, too. It wasn’t as much of a FRIENDS plot.”

“Who says I don’t want you for myself?”  Because he might not be in love with the kid, but really, he’s not going to lie to himself about how good his ass looks.  Or about that sort of feline grace that makes up for the fact that he’s not really the most built bloke the world’s ever seen.

Yancy laughs again, and seems a little more settled when he leans against the counter. “Wouldn’t make this any less of a sitcom.”

“Mouthing off isn’t a good way to get fucked, Yancy,” Herc tells him pointedly, and just like that, the atmosphere in the room shifts.

Just the way it always does, he imagines, Yancy’s real smile unfolds across his face. It’s not particularly charming, or it shouldn’t be, because it’s what you’d call “shit-eating,” if you were being charitable, but somehow seeing it is a relief.  It’s like he’s watching Yancy slide into his element. “With you?  Yeah, it is.  Besides, you’re not getting anywhere near my ass after what happened to it last night. You want to switch me or something, though, we can talk.”

Herc stares at him and decides it’s better that he doesn’t ask.

Yeah, no. He doesn’t want to know.

“Let’s skip the talking, Becket.”

“Not an orator in the act? That’s a shame.”

“You start babbling and I’ll gag you.”

Yancy laughs _again_ as Herc stands up and keeps laughing as he walks past him to rinse out the glass and put them both in the dishwasher. Either the kid thinks he’s _really_ funny or he’s gone and snapped.  “What, and take my mouth out of the equation?”

“If the next words out of it are something about how I’ll regret it, absolutely.”

Instead of anything like that, Yancy starts singing, mouth curling up at one side. “— _oh, no—tu ne regrettes rien_ —”

Really, the only proper response to that is to back the kid up against the counter and kiss him, because someone needs to keep his singing voice away from the world at large. Infuriatingly, it doesn’t really work, because Yancy keeps humming into it, in vague attempt at “tune”, even while he’s getting his arms over Herc’s shoulders and reeling him in. “You’re no Édith Piaf, Yancy.”

“More of a Marilyn Monroe?”

“I just don’t think you’d look as good in a dress.”

“Don’t,” Yancy says, pulling him forward by the collar to kiss the line of his jaw so softly it’s almost a distraction from the ridiculous shit he’s saying, “bet on that, Herc.”

Herc snorts, and ignores how Yancy wrinkles his nose at it.  “Clearly you aren’t old enough to know shit about Marilyn Monroe.”

Yancy rolls his eyes and stretches his back in the cage of Herc’s arms, curving backwards against the counter and wincing as the action pulls on some muscle that’s paining him. “Uh-huh, Grandpa. Only the real fifties kids can appreciate _Some Like it Hot_.  You gonna kiss me again, or do I have to do all the work here?”

Taking his hand off the counter next to Yancy’s hip, Herc drops it to his ass and bends his head to kiss him again, but the moment he tightens his fingers, Yancy twitches in his arms, making a quiet, pained noise against his mouth, and then twists out of the embrace, across the floor, catching him by the collar at the last minute and to drag him along.

And really, he doesn’t appreciate being dragged anywhere in his own damn house, so he uses the momentum to crowd the uppity little fucker against the wall at the mouth of the hall and trap him in again.  “Aw,” Yancy purrs, with a Cheshire grin splitting his face, “Is this gonna be a testosterone contest?”

“No,” Herc tells him shortly.

“Because, you know, it takes a real man to take it up the—”

It’s something Chuck would say, _has_ probably said, which is why Herc needs to stop him from finishing his sentence.

“Shut up, Yancy,” he orders before he shoves his way into another kiss, which is ruined by how Yancy is laughing against his lips.  “Aren’t you supposed to be good at this?” he asks when he pulls back.

“You want professionalism, Herc, you can pay me,” Yancy answers blithely.

“And what the hell happened to not giving it out for free?”

“Don’t trust a ho,” Yancy advises him, and slips out of his arms again, this time to slide down the wall and to his knees, coming to rest against the wall with Herc’s hips pinning him in, hands playing with the waistband of his trousers.

He’s not even half-hard yet, but that sight doesn’t hurt.  “Stick with Édith.”

“ _Rien de rien_ ,” Yancy sing-songs obligingly, leaning forward to run his mouth, open and hot, down the centre seam of the front of Herc’s pants.  “ _J’espere que tu n’a aucune idée ce que je dis._ ”

“On second thought, just stop talking.”  Herc’s not going to say it’s anything about the language, but he’s not made of stone where mouths near his cock are concerned.  When he goes to slide a hand into Yancy’s hair, however, Yancy uses his hands on his hips to push him backwards until he hits the wall, coming along with him with scarcely a protest.

“And what?” Yancy asks. “Suck your dick? In the hallway? For shame—”

“I’m not the one who got on my knees here, mate.”

“Exactly. I made my bed, let me lie in it.”

“I hate to break it to you,” Herc says, and even he can tell that his voice has dropped through the bottom of its range, turned rough with distraction because Yancy has his tongue out now, even if it’s still _outside_ the clothing, stroking over the bulge forming there with just enough pressure to tease. “But this is in no way a bed.”

“Then why don’t you go find me one, Sergeant?”

“End of the hall. Don’t call me that.”

“You grumpy piece of shit,” Yancy laughs, and stands up, tugs him forward for a moment and kisses him and tastes like fabric, which is disgusting, frankly.

Then he just up and disappears.  Except he doesn’t, really, he just ungracefully and quickly heads right for the door Herc indicated, with no apparent attempt at enticement.

It’s really more endearing than it has any right to be.

So he rolls his eyes as he follows, because he doesn’t have anybody to put on a face for, and wonders what the hell he’s doing, right now.

Yancy’s already pulling off his shirt, but when he hears Herc come in, he pauses before he strips it off. “Fair warning,” he says, and turns around to neatly put it on the dresser, baring a back full of long, red marks. “My dates from last night got _scratchy_. Try not to follow suit, I might cry and that would be embarrassing.”

“Dates plural?”

“What did you _think_ happened to my ass?  If I couldn’t take _one_ dick without bitching the next day, I wouldn’t be very good at my—”

Herc waves him quiet, because seriously, he doesn’t want to know.  Obligingly, Yancy shuts up.

For once.

For about fifteen seconds.

“Dude,” Yancy says, which is just—wrong already, “Drop ‘em.  I only go over the clothes with scared virgins.  And, you know, I assume your adorable little monster isn’t the result of the Immaculate Conception 2.0, so—”

“Yancy,” Herc warns him, “Shut up.”

Yancy laughs at him again, a pattern he’s beginning to find slightly disturbing. “Yes, sir,” he replies, and then he’s crossing the room and his hands are everywhere.  It’s really astonishing how much he’s perked up since he came in; either it’s the vodka or he’s actually excited about this, and Herc’s ego knows which option he prefers.

For all Yancy had said he wouldn’t be getting “professionalism”, the way those stupidly clever fingers pry him out of his clothes is nothing less than militarily efficient. “I would have gone for stripping,” he says as he’s tugging Herc forwards toward the bed, kicking off his shoes as he does so, “But I don’t think I have the abs and I can’t dance.”

“’s nothing wrong with your abs,” Herc tells him without thinking about it, because he’s got a hand on them at the moment, so he figures he ought to know.  “But I can believe you can’t dance.”

“ _Estou insultado_ ,” Yancy says again.

“Where the hell did you learn Portuguese, and why didn’t you leave it there?” Herc gripes, but he hooks two fingers in the waist of Yancy’s stupid cargo shorts and keeps him close anyway. Because even if he is an annoying piece of shit, he’s hot and grinning and into it, and Herc doesn’t exactly have the time to go out and get some very often.

Yancy grins and pushes him over by the shoulder, crawling over him before he kisses him again, and for all his dumbass posturing and unsubtle flirtation, he’s not dropping his hips into a low roll, he’s holding them stiffly, and yeah, maybe that makes sense. “Brazil.  And it got me my job, so have a little respect.”

The kiss gets ruined a little again by Yancy fucking _smirking into it_ , and Herc decides that’s about enough of _that_. Gets his knee up to Yancy’s hip, which is a stretch—he’s getting old, which is really not a thought he needs to have right now—and shoves the kid over, coming up top and pinning him into place, a move that is half combat, more athletic than he ever really wants to have to be in bed, and only makes the little bastard laugh harder. So he leans down to kiss him long enough that he shuts up eventually, at least—then keeps going. And if he’s using his teeth a little more than he would usually be, grazing Yancy’s lower lip enough to be maybe a little too sharp, well, there’s only so much backtalk he can take from someone he’s trying to take to bed.

By the time he pulls back, Yancy is breathless enough that he doesn’t start talking immediately, at least, and he’s humming low in his chest, some half-assed purr that he follows up by wrapping his arms around Herc’s neck and pulling him back down for another kiss, blessedly silent even when he does have the air back to be talking with. His lips are beginning to swell, standing out red against his skin, which has only slightly flushed.

His eyes seem brighter this way, even if only a little bit of the blue is visible past his growing pupils and under his half-dropped eyelids.

And really, it’s beautiful, the quiet is.  If Herc were the rhapsodizing type, he would.  Instead, he watches Yancy part his lips a little more, and just in case it’s to start up fucking talking again, bends down to kiss him again and presses the heel of his hand against the bulge in his shorts.

Yancy groans right into his mouth, squirms under his hand as his arms tighten around his neck, and yeah, that’s the only sort of noise he should be making.

He finds, as he’s pulling those stupid shorts off, a process Yancy helps with only slightly by pushing his hips up, getting his hand around him proper, that no more words really seem to have any inclination to fall from between those pretty lips. He almost, almost makes the observation that this isn’t most people’s “off” switch, but decides that, on the other hand, he doesn’t want to encourage a riposte.

The insides of Yancy’s thighs have handprint bruises on them.

Herc tries not to let that bother him.

It shouldn’t bother him.

It does.

But Yancy’s taking his hand off Herc’s shoulder and dropping it to his wrist, tugging his hand away, and before he can ask what he’s doing, Yancy’s shoving him over and rolling out from under him, crawling off the bed, and that attracts his attention pretty well. “Sorry,” Yancy says from the floor, popping back up with two plastic packets and tossing them at him. “Didn’t want you to catch chlamydia and die.”

“Chlamydia doesn’t kill you.”

And he’s pretty sure it doesn’t pass by handjob.

“I’m guessing you’re a regular dad, not a cool dad.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

“Oh my god,” Yancy moans, slinking back onto the bed and pushing him the rest of the way over, swinging a leg over his to sit over the tops of his thighs, a position which, frankly, makes Herc stop listening to anything he’s saying.  “I don’t know if I can sleep with you if you haven’t seen _Mean Girls_.”

“And I don’t know if I can sleep with a walking pop culture dictionary,” Herc says drily, putting his hands over the bruises on Yancy’s thighs where someone else’s hands were last night. His thumbs are facing the opposite way of the prints, and he’s hit with the mental image of Yancy arching back against some faceless bloke who’s pulling his thighs open for someone else. It is and is not a pleasant image all at once.

“But here we are. Cold feet, baby?” Yancy asks.

And the answer, it turns out, is no.

Not really.

 

Yancy stays, after.

Not because he asks to, or because Herc tells him to, but because he passes out the second he comes, and Herc doesn’t quite have the heart to wake him up just yet. He does wonder about how the boy ever managed sex work if he’s practically narcoleptic after orgasm, but remembering how little sleep he evidently got last night, he’s willing to afford him the benefit of the doubt that maybe this isn’t the usual pattern.

He figures he can wake him up in an hour or so.  Before Chuck gets back, because this isn’t a shitty movie and he refuses to sneak a hooker out the window like some sort of Shakespearian comedy of errors.

But it kind of is a shitty movie, because when he goes back in to wake him, Yancy refuses to be woken at first.

When he finally cracks an eye, though, he shoots upright, catching Herc’s chin with the side of his forehead—trying to get out of the bed in a mess of uncoordinated limbs and apologies, which Herc would probably accept if he weren’t trying to stop his eyes from watering.  By the time he’s dressed, still slightly pink in the face with a bruise blooming on his forehead that Herc’s sure he’s got the jaw to match, and he seems so damned embarrassed at having fallen asleep that it’s impossible to actually be angry at him.

Or maybe it’s that his ridiculous bedhead and the utter loss of all his smooth affectation make him particularly forgiveable.  “I should go.”

“Yeah, probably should. The brat won’t be gone forever.”

“Um,” Yancy starts, “Good luck on the story.  I’ll delete your number in about a week if nothing else crops up?”

It’s a question, and it shouldn’t be.  Herc might be shit with people, but he thinks he knows _why_ it’s a question, so he decides to be stupid for the second time today and replies, “Nah.  Leave it. Give me a ring sometime if you want another couple of weeks of grief.”

Yancy stares at him for a minute, and then that grin creeps back across his face.  There is nothing fond or excited or sweet about it in and of itself, shows too many teeth for that, but the fact that it’s there is something close to all three.  “That sounds like a terrible idea.”

“It is a terrible idea,” he acknowledges, and shrugs one shoulder, rubbing a hand across his jawline. Fuck, but he needs to shave. Yancy’s got stubble burn all up his neck and the side of his face and probably on the insides of his thighs, too. “Worst one I’ve had in years.”

“No, it’s not,” Yancy replies, raising his eyebrows.  “That trophy goes to hiring me in the first place.”

Herc snorts and crosses his arms over his chest.  “Could’ve gone a whole hell of a lot worse.”

Yancy rolls his eyes. “I know.  You just got laid for free and everything.”

“’Getting laid’ is a little less tame.”

“Aw,” Yancy’s smile goes falsely sweet, almost obnoxious.  “Your narrow-minded definition of getting laid makes me so hot.”

“Go home, Yancy Becket.”

Yancy shoves him backwards into the doorframe and kisses him hard before he limps away down the drive. Herc fancies maybe he looks a little less haggard than he did when he came over.

Grins a little, one canine peeking over his lower lip before he realizes that he’s just made plans to date for real someone he’s about to fake breaking up with.

Chuck’s going to mock him until the day he snaps and commits filicide.

Might just be worth it, though.


End file.
